Episode 788 | Do I Need a Co-founder? And More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)

You're listening to another episode of Startups with the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and today, I'm joined by fan favorite Derek Reimer as we dive in to listener questions. This episode runs a little long, and I let it run long because we dove really deep into a couple of these questions. And I felt like the deeper we went, the more kind of knowledge we unlocked. And so I really appreciated Derek spending the time with me today and going going over our our allotted time. And I hope you'll stick around to the end even though it's longer than a typical episode because I really do think some of the things we dug into today are far beyond the surface level of what we could have dug into by, you know, only spending five or six minutes answering each question. Before we dive in to our conversation, MicroConf Europe is only six weeks away. It's in Istanbul, Turkey from September 28 through the thirtieth. We already have an amazing docket of speakers, including Michelle Hansen, Mark Thomas, James Moring, and myself. We're gonna have more than a 170 attendees. And last year, we had folks from across 30 countries, and something like 25, almost 30% had at least a 100 k of MRR, not ARR. So it's a really amazing group of bootstrap founders to be in a room with. This event will sell out, and in fact, we are 89 sold out at this point. We have sold out all of our in person events for the past few years. So if you want a ticket, you're gonna wanna head to microconf.com/europe. In addition, I wanna tease that we're gonna be releasing the first episode of season five of tiny seed tales on Thursday. So keep your eye out for that in this feed. I hope you enjoy the new season. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Derek. Derek Reimer, welcome back to the show. It's great to be back. Wow. It's great to have you, man. We are digging into listener questions today. Have some across some great topics like how crucial is a cofounder, how can I balance security with producing products, And many more? And our first comes to us from Thomas Parker. I'm hope hoping I'm pronouncing his name right, but he's asking how crucial it is to have a cofounder. My name is Thomas. Thanks for all the value you create and share. A friend told me about TinySeed when I was starting my project Prism, which you can find at prism.guide last fall, and I've gotten a lot from the podcast since then. I'm wondering how crucial you think it is to have a cofounder, especially in terms of general success, but also in terms of being a company that TinySeap would potentially fund. I have a fifteen year career in the niche world of self directed education where I cofounded an education model and nonprofit …